


Getting Better

by lonestarbabe (neverfeltlesscool), Pigeonsplotinsecrecy



Category: 9-1-1: Lone Star (TV 2020)
Genre: Addiction, Depression, Gen, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:53:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23125057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfeltlesscool/pseuds/lonestarbabe, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigeonsplotinsecrecy/pseuds/Pigeonsplotinsecrecy
Summary: T.K. knows that he needs to get better because if he doesn't, he'll lose all the things that give him joy.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 45





	Getting Better

Getting better doesn’t start with knowing what’s wrong. It starts with the symptoms— the missed hours of sleep, the numbness, the desire for everything to stop. It starts in a dark room; you can’t see anything, but you can feel that your skin doesn’t feel quite right beneath your fingers, and you can taste the fear in the air. You can smell the stifling staleness of the room you’ve locked yourself into. Most of all, you hear the cacophony of your mind, and for a while, it’s welcome because the silence is deafening with its absence of stimuli. That’s what people don’t get about getting better. You’re not trying to find the light. You’re discovering that it exists because being mentally ill isn’t living in the darkness; it’s wondering if maybe, just maybe, you are the darkness.

You don’t hit a rock bottom. Mental illness is a bottomless pit that you try to crawl your way out of, and as soon as you climb a little higher, you slide back down and can only try not to keep falling. Sometimes, you’ll fall no matter how much you stretch and contort yourself just for the chance your fingers might make contact with something you can use to pull your body back up. Unfortunately, gravity isn’t often agreeable. It helps you spiral, but it doesn’t let you get back up.

Getting better is a series of stops and starts that feel never-ending and leave you blind and spinning like you’re trying and failing to play a game of pin the tail on the donkey. T.K. is almost always dizzy, and it makes him wonder if he’ll always be trapped in this awful world that his brain has created for him because when he can’t see anything better than this, even though people tell him it’s there.

Mental illness feels like an impossibly strong villain. T.K. knows this better than anyone, but on paper, getting better seems so easy. Take a step forward and do something that will make your life a little less grim. Easy. He’s known how to walk since he was nine months, but those minuscule steps into the unknown are scarier than running into an inferno. Getting better isn’t a rational process. It’s not untangling the chaos; it’s learning to rearrange the tangles so you can better navigate the knots that will always somehow live inside you.

So, T.K.’s trying. His fingers are sore from trying to sort those damn knots, but some days, it’s hard to even want to change. The world is gray again, and it’s so gray that it doesn’t seem worth trying to color it in. This kind of coloring is terrifying. It’s not like paint by numbers. It’s like having a coloring book covered with nonsensical shapes on its pages. You have to rearrange the lines before you can even pop open your tin of colored pencils, and then when the tin is finally opened, it’s almost impossible to tell which color should go where because you’re so used to it all being the same color.

Getting better is a solitary journey. It’s a war between you and yourself and you can’t call in any support troops. You can only hope that those around will tend to your wounds after you’ve fought the battle and that a therapist can give provide you a good strategy. But in the battlefield, it’s only you. The 126 is always there for T.K. He knows that he has a support system, one far too good for him, but when it comes to this mental illness, they can’t take shifts for him. They can’t put out the flames raging in his mind. But it’s okay. It’s okay because their smiles and jokes and laughs make things better. They boost morale just by being there. It helps to know that he won’t have to be better alone.

There are so many wounds that T.K. has yet to heal. There are Band-Aids that have been there so long that they have become fused to the skin. The wounds underneath have faded to scars, but he’s scared to look at them because once he rips off the Band-Aids, they will tear up his skin again. They’ll bleed, and he won’t be able to ignore all the things his body has been trying to tell him for long. He’ll feel the pain he told his skin not to feel. He’ll feel the pain he told his heart was just foolishness, nothing serious. But he has to feel the awfulness because you don’t get better by feeling okay. You get better by stepping into the traffic of your mind and learning to be the best at the game of mental Frogger. You’ll never stop playing the game of waiting for and dodging traffic, but you don’t have to be afraid. Sometimes you’ll get hit, but you can play again and again until the batteries in the console run out. You don’t have endless chances, but when tragedy strikes, you can choose to keep playing.

Recovery is finding happiness, but happiness is not paradise. It is not easy. It takes work. It requires pain. Happiness is not a constant state of feeling happy. It is being able to feel happy again even when life kicks you down. It is letting go of your need to never feel sad, mad, disappointed, angry, or sorrowful. It is fighting to smile. It is letting the colors shine brightly into your eyes and knowing that when you’re overwhelmed by the brightness that you should wear sunglasses instead of turning the saturation all the way down. Happiness is something T.K. has yet to find. He hasn’t known it since before New York turned gray, filled with smoke and ghosts of those that were lost. Happiness is foreign and scary, but it seems like the only way to want to be alive. It’s complex and confusing. It’s loud and bright. It’s everything life has to offer. It is risk. It is reward. It is seeing the gray amid all the other colors.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. You can find me and more of my shenanigans at Lonestarbabe at tumblr.


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